September 19, 2014

Jens Voigt has long been one of the most enteraining riders in the pro cycling peleton. He is the kind of guy us regular cyclists love. Yesterday he broke the World One Hour Record, one of the most legendary feats in cycling. Basically the rider goes alone to see how far they can ride on a track in a single hour.

He got off the bike and then retired from cycling for good. Perfect Jens. Here are a few things he leaves us fans.

July 10, 2014

My pal, Stogie Robinson, and I make a near weekly telephone call where we catch up, discuss important life stuff, and then amble into a bit of general sports talk to wrap things up. He's a long suffering Philly sports fan although I remind him while it's been a long time for the Sixers, Flyers, and Eagles, the Phillies have been decent in recent years. But hey, if he wants to suffer I will let him. I like to remind Stogie that I am a life long Pittsburgh sports fan which means, recent Pirates teams excepted, we get to celebrate championships often enough to smooth over the rough patches.

That being said, we recently agreed that right now we are in the Annual American Summer Sports Drought until NFL and College Football gets rolling in a few months. Have you checked out a sports talk show lately? All these folks can talk about is where 3 or 4 NBA starts will sign for next season. It's bigger than the actual basketball season. Do I really care what the wife of some highly paid athlete tweeted last night and what it means? Come on, man! This is another reason I just cannot bring myself to watch professional basketball anymore. And baseball will not be relevant until late August which is when football becomes relevant, so sorry baseball. You lose. Again.

Sigh. So America...how about we all stop suffering with who is going to sign where and acting like anyone cares? And I already know unless you are a die hard baseball guy, like my brother in-law Dan, you are not really paying attention to any games this month. A casual glance at the Sunday standings tells you all you need to know. Let me tell you, there is some awesome stuff if you care to expand your horizons a bit.

That World Cup semi-final last night that ended in a 0-0 (or you can be cool and say Nil-Nil) tie until it was won with a shootout was not boring. It was 120 minutes of tension. Perfect tension. The Dutch spent all their key resources shutting down one guy, Messi, to the point they had no ability to try to score themselves. And then the guy who got shut down scores the first point in the shootout and the look on his face is the "We got this" look. Game over.

And then Stage 5 of the Tour de France yesterday was an instant classic. The Tour has 21 stages, but the first week is usually a number of easy days with sprint finishes and the hard stuff starts later. But this year started with two difficult days out of five and yesterday was off the charts. As a cycling fan, some of my favorite races are done early in the year and are called The Spring Classics or The Momuments. They are often raced in harsh weather conditions and winning one can make a career.

Paris-Roubaix is the Queen of The Classics. It is also referred to as The Hell of The North. Yesterdays Tour de France route was over much of the same route and after almost a week of racing in perfect weather, it rained all day. One of the difficult parts of the route are these sections of cobblestones, some of which date back to the Roman era. The are bone jarring in dry weather. In wet weather they are slippery and bone jarring and when mud creeps onto them from the farmlands the difficulty factor goes off the charts.

The defending champion crashed out of the race leading some to say the choice of routes was a bad idea from the race organizers. But nay, nay I say. Riders were so focused that the overall race speed was at the top end of what the pros ride. The peloton (the field) split apart. Unsure bike handlers had difficulty. We saw one guy overcook a turn and flip over the bike into farmland.

Some of the great bike handlers went fast and sure. The overall race leader, Vincenzo Nibali, had a day he may look back on as one of the finest in his career. This years overall champion will truly be able to say he was the best overall on different terrain and weather conditions.

This morning I went for a bike ride and had my own little Roubiax action. It rained a bit. I road over a short section of brick road. Hey, we don't have any cobbles around here. I caught a dirt and rock section between roads and then rolled down a paved section that was gator-backed broken asphalt. Yes, I had my own Walter Mitty moment. It was awesome being out there. Out there.

So I say take a peek at the world. Cheer the world. Get out there. Enjoy something different. Look at something different. Get caught up. You are welcome.

January 10, 2014

Wow! I had no idea Cleveland Browns management was so savvy until I saw this trailer. Instead of using history this movie must be a future tense proposition. It is kind of like Moneyball before it was money. Maybe it is like Jerry Mcguire without the super cute kid and Tom Cruise wanting to be a better man.

My friend John, a life long and long suffering Browns fan, says this movie would be better if it came out on April 1st. instead of April 11, 2014. Nice sense of perspective that John has. Go Browns...except when you play the Steelers!

August 28, 2013

Down the road a few miles, after the final whistle blew, manhood lay waiting. Whatever it demanded of him, he must have thought back then, wouldn't be any tougher than trying to hang on to a badly thrown ball when you know the strong safety was about to spear you with his headgear, slam that Riddell in the pit of your stomach. In a sense, he'd been right. Learning not to drop the ball had been the hardest thing for him as a man too. - Steve Yarbrough

The guy in the photo is my dad the season he was my youth league coach. He is holding my helmet.

February 05, 2013

-Hanging out with great friends having good food and better yet, awesome laughter.

-Pointing out the Game Day credentials with the lanyards our company manufactured. Yes, it is amazing my great friends tolerated my continual yammering about this.

-Finding this Oreo tweet...because it is way more interesting than those 9 guys on the CBS payroll who talk for a living but could not find anything interesting to say during the power outage. Several of them did display awesome skills at sweating, repeating sentences and repeating sentences.

-Best commercial? God Made A Farmer...proving depth supersedes sizzle. Thank God for all those years we had Paul Harvey on the radio.

October 25, 2012

I do not remember my first bike. Do tricycles on the sidewalk count? I think my original three wheeler trike was followed by a rusty hand-me-down two wheeler.

What I do remember is my first new bike. In early grade school I bolted downstairs on a Christmas morning to find her waiting for me. She was a maroon Sting-Ray with a smooth black banana seat and chrome in all the right places. She had a classic look and she was mine. That bike was the Daisy Red Rider of my childhood.

Our town was a perfect kids-on-bikes town where you could leave the house on a summer morning and play all day. Someones mom might feed you lunch or maybe you just forgot about lunch or you returned enough empty pop bottles for credit to get a snack at the corner store. We kids rode every where on our bikes and the biggest rules were be good, don't fight, and be home in time for dinner. Adults in the community kept a general eye on us with laughs, kind smiles, and a wave of the hand.

We flew kites in the potato fields, built forts and played with Matchbox cars or Tonka trucks. Our bikes took us to all the nooks in town to explore. Some days we built homemade ramps and pretended we were Evel Knievel. No helmet - no gloves - usually wearing laceless sneakers from the discount store - sometimes with a shirt tied around our neck for a cape. We were fearless. Road rash and Mercurochrome were our badges of summer.

And then I started to grow up. We moved to the country where the road out front was busy and there was no great place to ride bikes. My dad helped us trade and we got a motorized mini-bike. It was great. I started playing sports, especially football and life was just different. Good, but not the same anymore. Instead of dreaming I was Evel riding a wheelie I dreamed of becoming a Pittsburgh Steeler.

I forgot about bikes for a long time. In high school I hunted, fished, chased a few girls, and played other sports to train for football. Then I went off to college, fell in love, got married, and did not become a Steeler. There is not a thing I would change about any of it.

Soon there were jobs, two kids and we moved into a starter home. JD and Beth started on trikes & Big Wheels and then moved on to their first new bikes which also arrived at Christmas. My wife also found a little two wheel bike with training wheels at a second hand shop and it became the bike of choice to learn two wheel riding. It was smaller than the new bikes and the kids could stand flat footed when they stopped which seemed to inspire confidence. Denine and I laugh when it comes up as a all-time great investment. My wife is brilliant. I think half the neighborhood kids may have learned to ride on that plain little old bike that looked like the paint job was done with a bristle brush and blue Rust-oleum.

Bikes were back in our family. I purchased a hybrid to take on vacations and ride with the kids. For a few years I would ride on vacation and get excited enough to ride the rest of the summer by myself on the road. By the end of each summer I could out ride the bike and I wanted bigger gears. I would mention this to the owner of the local bike shop that we used and he would suggest getting a road bike. The problem was I just could not visualize me as one of "those guys" bent over a bike and wearing tight stretchy cloths.

Then Jason asked me to lift a road bike off the rack. Oh. I understood. I stilled waited and made the investment the next spring. And then I waited some more and finally started after I spent time on the couch after a minor surgery and realized I needed to start living healthier. That is when I really started riding a bike again.

It did not take long to enjoy the feeling of my own efforts pushing me down the road. The bike was no longer a limitation, but a vehicle that set me free. I joined an informal group of local guys for weekly rides. Those rides fostered friendships and I started learning the dynamics of sitting in a paceline or large group. We began traveling to cycling events together.

Eventually I started racing. Those races have been town line sprints on group rides and with a number on my back at official events. I've learned what it feels like to make the right move at the right time to drive for the win and I've learned what it feels like to blow to bits out on the road and just hope to make it back.

When the ProTour events are televised I record them and watch the two-wheeled chess matches with fascination. Like most avid cyclists I have tried to explain race strategy to others and how hard it is to ride a perfect ride. And as astounding as it is to win a Grand Tour, I have stood slack jawed at the moves of the strongmen in the early season one day classics. Perhaps no other racing distills riding a bike to its pure essence as those monuments.

These days I am a seasoned cyclist. I more than enjoy riding. I am thankful to ride. Out on the road my mind clears and I can think about life. Nothing has ever made me feel mentally or physically better then how I feel after a good ride.

Recently I was riding with a close friend on a cool, clear Saturday morning. We had blue skies and the sun warmed us as we spun along. We talked about how good it was just to be able to go out and ride. For quite awhile we climbed a hilly section while we chatted about the stuff of life. Then as we turned a corner we quietly went to work. Our conversation stopped and we blasted through huge rollers exchanging alternating pulls at the front.

After one last decent and then a long uphill section we worked our way home giving it all we had. We closed fast and clean on the sign that marks the finish sprint on large group rides. Then it was over and it was time to get back to the rest of life.

Cycling is a difficult sport to explain someone who does not ride. It is much more than simply turning pedals in a circle. It is so basic in concept, yet so elegant in nuance.

Most of my life has been marred by some professional sporting scandal or another. Now, what many have suspected about professional cycling for a long time has manifest itself. Ego and desire to win at any cost is ugly in any sport, but perhaps especially difficult to explain in a sport that is already complex to anyone not involved with it.

Lance once said it is not about the bike. Life is not about the bike, but riding is. It's about freedom and simply riding well. Some folks have thrown their hands up in disgust and said everything is corrupt and the sport should just be killed. I don't know what to say to anyone with that position, so let me just ask one question.